First two weeks at Amazon - An outside-in perspective

In the summer of 2018, I was working on an interesting project of modeling electromagnetic energy’s impact on human body and building out a response surface using a simulation software. It was in the late in the evening around 7:30 PM and most of my colleagues left for the day. I wrapped up my work to leave as well. At that moment, I asked myself an important question - how am I making a difference in this world? It’s a simple but powerful question that has helped me to think big over the years and identify the most critical problems that customers are interested in solving . One thing that has become clear to me over years of talking to customers is that, almost everyone is thinking about cloud and how to apply aspects of AI/ML to their product development to innovate faster. When I kept challenging myself to identify and solve the problems that customers cared about and motivated myself to learn new technologies along the way, one thing led to another and I ended up in the exciting world of solution architecture design at AWS.

Having worked for a startup, medium-sized companies and as someone who is fascinated learning about the history of successful tech companies, I was pretty intrigued to learn about Amazon’s culture when I started. I wanted to get an outside-in perspective on how Amazon and in particular AWS, operates at scale. As I write, I am in week 3 and learning everyday. However, there are a few principles that immediately stood out over the past two weeks on how Amazon culture is different. I thought I’d share this with my audience:

• Customer Focus vs. Competition Focus

My first week at Amazon coincided with SKO 21. I got to hear from Andy Jassy and the leadership team about customer success stories, migration journeys and game-changing innovations in different verticals. There were close to 100+ speakers, who spoke over the 5 day period. I observed that everyone spoke only about serving customers and never mentioned anything about the competition. This was pretty interesting to me as we always hear about companies talking about their products and how it is differentiated than their competitors in the market. But here at Amazon, the focus is always on customers and working backwards from customers. It’s the first leadership principle — customer obession!

• Value-based Innovation vs. Cool Tech

Most of us work in tech because, somewhere inside us, there is a geek who gets excited about technological innovations. What I have observed over the years is that, sometimes we get lost in how cool a tech product is vs. how useful it is for customers. Almost all the products at AWS are created based on customer requests and conversations. Even some of the new ones like EKS, Athena, Neptune were built and continuously iterated for the purpose of adding value to customer workflows and not because the underlying technology is cool and cutting-edge.

• Collaborative Culture and Always Looking for Fresh Perspectives

AWS has customers across almost every domain possible and so the problem space being solved is vast! A wide-array of skill-sets is required to solve these problems and requires tight collaboration internally as well as with partners. Everyone, irrespective of whether they are experienced industry veterans, fresh out of college, specialists, generalists are all asked to share their perspectives and build consensus on their ideas, strategies, processes that is in the best interest of customers.

With that, I am going to wrap-up this post. I hope you learnt something today and you are excited as I am about the new innovations in cloud computing in 2021! I am going to leave you with a fact that blows my mind. Per a Gartner report, the global IT spend is project to be $3.8 Trillion in 2021. Despite the fact that AWS has made a head-start and is already a multi-billion dollar company, we are still scratching the surface because, the global IT cloud adoption is only at 4%. So, we are all in for an exciting journey ahead! 🚀

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